Using a character’s name has long been a tried-and-true way to come up with a book title; one need look no further than Anna Karenina (or Amelia Bedelia) for proof. And this more specific iteration—the Protagonist Does a Thing formula—been around at least since Mr. Smith went to Washington. You still see it in movies—Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris comes to theaters next month—as well as celebrity profiles and children’s books all the time. Lately, though, it has become the formula du jour for women’s fiction—so much so that some authors are even renaming their protagonists to fit in with the trend.
As you approach the gateway to the underworld, the driving gets hairy. The clifftop road skirts ruined towers and terraces carved by desperate farmers into the barren mountains, before dead-ending at the southern tip of the Mani, the wildest part of the Peloponnese. The roar of the cicadas dies away and, on the finger of land dividing the Aegean and Ionian seas, only thorns seem to grow. Known as Cape Matapan or Cape Tenaro, this beautiful, desolate headland hosts the entrance to the kingdom of Hades.
Or so classical authors such as Euripides implied; others put the gateway farther north in Greece, or near Naples, or on the Turkish coast. But for visitors who suspend disbelief on the path that winds from a derelict chapel to a quiet cove, this is it: the place where Heracles dragged Cerberus, the three-headed guard-dog, snarling into the light, and where Orpheus turned and lost Eurydice to the darkness for ever.
Prizing the rare and beautiful over the unattractive and commonplace is hardly unique to culinary preferences. Engagement rings, after all, usually feature diamonds rather than concrete. But such narrow-minded food choices can have irrevocable consequences: the bluefin tuna and Chinook salmon may not survive human fondness for them. Better to stare into a sea-devil’s beady eyes, or get to grips with a geoduck, than to contribute to the permanent loss of a species.
Meredith has not left her home for 1,214 days. She writes in the first person, giving a day to day account of her life, interspersed with flashbacks to childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. This is a suspense novel, but an unusual one. The question is whether she will ever venture forth again, and if so, why and when?